


Failure to Launch

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Except Not Because They're Nerds, Gen, NO COFFEE SHOPS, Party Like It's 1999, Queer Themes, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-06-27 04:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15678126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: At the cusp of the millennium, a painfully earnest freshman with ambitions in Poli-Sci and an introverted sophomore engineering student cross paths with a little help from Dante and Rodin. To what end? Maybe none at all.





	1. Desire Without Hope

**Author's Note:**

> This is both set at the turn of the millennium-- quite a foreign land at this point, two decades in the rearview mirror-- and is grounded firmly in the headspace thereof. It's a thing to keep in mind as the characters fail to understand themselves. If they had a different set of words at their disposal, they might, at times, use them. Or not.

_October_

The Gates looked tame at first, two dark rectangles limned out by ground-level spotlights in the lavender twilight. Oifey drew close, so close the tip of his nose nearly scraped against bronze, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he began to see their depth, the layers of the twisted and tumbling bodies. He craned his head back to take in the somber figure perched in eternal contemplation above the door, and Oifey felt a prickle race along the back of his neck upon seeing this icon in its proper context, worlds removed from the pedestal in front of the Meyer Library. Thinker, Poet, or the original Sinner himself contemplating his works… Oifey knew what others had made of it, but to be sure he had no such heady opinions as yet, just as his partially-trained eye and mind didn’t know yet how to untangle the whirl of the damned before him.

He might have been there for hours as twilight gave way to darkness, but a low cough to his right made Oifey peer into the gloom beyond the artificial light. One of his fellow students was there among the sculptures, and after a moment of study, Oifey thought he had the name.

“Finn?”

“I didn’t want to startle you,” came the response, though Finn didn’t step forward to let himself really be seen.

“Oh. Thanks,” Oifey offered. An explanation for his presence at the _The Gates of Hell_ at this hour was on the tip of his tongue, but something made him bite back upon it. Maybe it was that Finn wasn’t giving any reason for his own presence. “Do you come here often?”

“I suppose so.” After a moment, Finn added, “I was on my way to the Arizona Garden.”

“I’d like to see that,” Oifey said, for he’d missed the nighttime tour of the notoriously macabre landscape around the Mausoleum the weekend before. 

An invitation wasn’t offered, exactly, but shortly thereafter Oifey was tagging behind the upperclassman, following the ray of Finn’s flashlight through a eucalyptus grove. 

“Is this it?” He thought he saw an opening in the foliage and made to follow it, but Finn snapped the flashlight off and then on again in an unmistakable warning signal.

“It’s a _cactus garden_ ,” said Finn. “It’s best not to stray from the path.”

What Finn’s flashlight brought to his eyes wasn’t a garden so much as a jumble of plants as chaotic and twisted as the bodies in Rodin’s _Gates_. Spirals of aloe and agave and fingers of cactus made an impenetrable barrier, and Oifey thought not of Arizona but of Sleeping Beauty in her enchanted palace, guarded by a thicket of thorns.

“How do you get through it?”

“Carefully or not at all,” Finn replied. 

He must have memorized the path, for he led Oifey one step at a time through it until they stood amid the whirl of spikes before an ancient Joshua tree that reigned over the garden, a many-headed beast crouched there in the dark. Now Oifey felt that every one of his hairs stood on end, bristling like the very cactus thorns. 

“How long has it been… like this?” _This_ , something out of Hawthorne or some other purveyor of nineteenth-century horror, in the middle of a well-trafficked university between the main drive into campus and the new art museum.

“Sixty years, or so I’ve heard.” Oifey noted that Finn sounded oddly neutral on whether or not he believed the claim. “They took a bulldozer to some of it this past winter… you should’ve seen it before.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t,” said Oifey. 

He was sorry to leave it that night, but the battery of Finn’s flashlight was beginning to give way and neither of them wanted to take a cactus paddle to the face, so he and Finn went back to the relative safety of the Main Quad. Normally Oifey would slow down to have a good look at _The Burghers of Calais_ , the assemblage that the budding Poli-Sci major in him felt the most affinity for out of the Rodin works dotting the campus, but tonight his thoughts were already too full up on contortions of bronze and greenery to appreciate the burghers in the anguish of their martyrdom.

“I suppose I’ll see you in class,” said Finn as they parted ways before Memorial Church. 

“Sure! Thanks for showing me the garden,” said Oifey, and he hurried back towards his dormitory. He’d signed up for a seven AM class four days out of five and realized only after he’d committed to the schedule that most students did _no such thing_ to themselves.

-x-

He didn’t see Finn again until the next _Inferno_ seminar. Oifey’s twenty-one credits were all taken up by the “fuzzy” side of things, freshman Humanities courses and the intro to his Poli-Sci classes, and he’d gathered from glancing over Finn’s other books that the sophomore belonged to the techie side of the spectrum, which meant Finn belonged on the other side of campus. This elective seemed the singular point at which their paths might cross.

The _Professore_ , whose given name was Cecilia, had beautiful flowing hair, and seeing it spilling over her shoulders that afternoon gave Oifey strange thoughts of fluid bronze and agave stems. He buried his nose in the text of Canto IV and let himself be lost in the Poet/Pilgrim’s encounter with a gallery of pagan worthies ranging from Hector to Seneca to Saladin. He’d been slowly breaking himself of the inner refusal to mark up a book, and now his pen skipped from the Italian on the left-hand pages to the English translation on the right as he underscored whatever seemed to reinforce the _Professore’s_ key points.

_and they did me an even greater honor, for they made me one of their band, so that I was sixth among so much wisdom…_

As class wound down, Oifey glanced at Finn, who took copious notes in class but rarely offered any opinion. From what Oifey could read of Finn’s upside-down notebook, he had rather different takeaways from what Oifey found striking.

_and only so far harmed that without hope we live in desire_

A broad and general curiosity propelled Oifey to intercept Finn on their way out of the classroom.

“Where do you live? I’m in Donner.”

“Florence Moore,” came the reply, and that meant something, because everyone made a point of calling the dorm _FloMo_ in the way that everyone abbreviated _everything_ on campus.

“Oh, with the ice cream,” said Oifey, for the cafeteria was legendary on campus for serving six flavors of ice cream at every meal. Oifey in his current residence had to make do with a “fro-yo” machine that seemed half the time to be broken.

“With the ice cream,” Finn echoed.

And so Oifey negotiated himself an invitation to lunch at FloMo, the land of endless ice cream sundaes.

**To Be Continued**


	2. A Tourist in the Church

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oifey develops a friendship with his classmate but generally fails to fit at campus. Contemplating the Centaurs' relationship with God is just more interesting than discovering the inner lives and burdens of the people you live around. We've all been there.

_November_

That first lunch date over chocolate ripple and rainbow sherbet at the FloMo cafeteria led to another, which led naturally enough to burgers and cheap burritos at The Treehouse. Oifey discovered that for all that he and Finn grew up on opposite coasts they had a shocking amount in common, including dead parents and the experience of having been farmed out to distant relations. Oifey wondered now if they’d somehow each managed to intuit that about the other, maybe recognized a certain brand of otherwise unfathomable loneliness that came from having both one’s parents gone. Not that they really talked at any length about how they felt, of course.

That sort of connection, while not common, wasn’t exactly surprising. Parents died. What did surprise Oifey into a positive state of delight was the gift Finn brought to The Treehouse.

“This was the poster for last year’s Gaities,” said Finn, unrolling a glossy parody of a popular movie poster, only featuring university leaders in place of action heroes. “You spoke of being sorry Provost Rice wasn’t here anymore, so I thought you might want it.”

Oifey, not accustomed to having anyone even recognize the _name_ of his heroine, could only marvel at the way Finn had remembered his offhand comment of regret and then acted on it. This gave Oifey the feeling he was making great strides at finding an actual friend, something that wasn’t happening back in his own dorm with any alacrity, but that momentum stumbled when he suggested they do something on a Sunday, go hiking or take the train up to The City.

“I’ll be at Mass,” said Finn, and at first Oifey took this to mean that Finn was making a hit-and-run on some academic institution in Massachusetts that weekend. It cost him a moment before he realized the actual import.

“Oh,” he said, for the last time he’d been in a church was at his parents’ funeral. Not even for a wedding— his cousin Ethlyn had been married at Filoli Gardens and then went and had a church ceremony back in Boston to make her new in-laws happy.

He went along, feeling as much of a tourist in Memorial Church as he’d been in Notre Dame or St. Peter’s. Memorial Church (he couldn’t force himself to call it “MemChu”) was beautiful, of course, like some fantasia on a theme of Constantinople with its graceful arches and glittering mosaics, and it was interesting to watch a Mass even if he didn’t partake in communion (he’d asked if he ought to and Finn gave him a strong warning not to if he hadn’t gone to confession). The church at his parents’ funeral was an ugly affair, with a steep peaked roof devoid of grace and a window that might’ve been made out of pieces of broken soda bottles for all the pleasure it gave one to look upon, and Oifey did not imagine God was with him that particular day. Perhaps God was not there beneath the dome of Memorial Church but at least it seemed possible.

Afterwards he and Finn took a late lunch at The Treehouse and the discussion turned not to Catholicism _precisely_ (though for certain Oifey had questions regarding that) but to the text of _Inferno_ , as ten cantos in Oifey was enthralled by it but perhaps, he feared, for suspect reasons. He marveled at the structure and the architecture of Dante’s Hell, at its fusion of the pre-Christian classical and Italian Catholicism. He found it a fun game to comb through each canto searching for historical and literary figures he recognized and to see what Dante did with them. The morality of Dante’s world, a vision bound to the limits of an idealized Florence, resonated less with him, and so it intrigued Oifey to learn what Finn got out of _Inferno_ given that Finn had an actual grasp on Catholic orthodoxy.

“So I thought Beatrice was an actual saint?” began one conversational thread.

“Not that I’ve ever heard,” came the reply, and by the time the food was cold Oifey had learned the present criteria for canonization in the eyes of the actual Church and they’d speculated on why Beatrice might or might not be eligible.

Oifey was beginning to feel that he was getting out of university the sort of thing he thought he wanted from the experience. Then he went back to Donner Hall, where red plastic cups exuding a sickly lemon-sugar scent littered the carpet near his door and very loud, very bad swing music leaked down from the third floor.

-x-

It wasn’t as though Oifey wasn’t trying to make the most of his experience on campus. When he found out the girl in the room at the end of the hall (the one who kept an illicit hamster named for Princess Diana) had a column in the _Review_ , he asked if she could get him in with the paper. He took his portfolio of essays down there and met the editor and some of the other writers. Though L’Arachel was friendly and even gracious to him, her fellow writers there struck Oifey as a strangely mean-spirited lot by the end of the interview. He wasn’t entirely sorry they never got back to him.

Then there was the beach trip, wherein he piled into a Jeep with three of his fellow Donnerites and had the pleasure of standing on the pale shore fully clothed as the others, lulled into complacency by the Gulf Stream waters off New Jersey, went dashing into the blue waves of the Pacific and ran back numbed and screaming. He’d warned them and they didn’t listen and really it was almost funny, though he did have the sense not to laugh.

At least he was being invited to things… even if he didn’t often attend. He did attend the Gaities, which struck him as shockingly tribal and vulgar, as its central conceit involved his school’s mascot molesting the mascot of the university across the bay. He attended one dance and found the sugar-vodka-lemon drinks so popular in his dorm to be rather pleasant after all. When his RAs put on an event one night called “Crossing the Line” wherein the Donnerites were invited to reveal deeply private things about themselves before their peers, Oifey drew his own line and declined this particular form of team-building or whatever it was. It had overtones of the sort of coerced testimonials that Oifey associated with tent revivals on the one hand and Communists on the other, and he wanted part of neither. He remained in the room he shared with a rarely-present mate, losing himself in Hell’s seventh circle and Dante’s encounter with Chiron, most illustrious of the Centaurs, and the issue of whether or not Centaur-kind was deemed by the Poet to be at war with God.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Yes, Oifey is a Condoleezza Rice fanboy. If you mostly remember her as a Secretary of State under W (if you remember her at all), keep in mind her background in the Cold War post-Soviet Europe and imagine what a little poli-sci geek from an elite family would think.
> 
> 2) The poster of Condi Rice in a parody of Armagedddon is real. I think I still have mine?
> 
> 3) The Gaities circa 1999 were jaw-droopingly awful. Maybe the mascot-molestation-pregnancy plot was actually from 2000 but anyway, AWFUL.
> 
> 4) At this not-fictional university whose identity should be clear (x-ref Provost Rice & MemChu), the Daily was the mainstream student paper and the Review was the right-wing student paper.

**Author's Note:**

> The unnamed (but, I think terribly obvious) University is real. I went there.


End file.
